Why Today’s Humans Have No Sense of Scale

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All the blogging/writing/talking/chirping in the world isn’t going to bring about the new world that was promised to you a child mewling before the roundup-ready grass of suburban lawn in the advanced disintegration of the west.

In the US , the perennial hopes of enfranchised liberals like the Counterpunchers, Common dreamers, and the folkish establishmentarians are always stoked by the puffy features of plastics-based communication technology, but where is the sense of scale in what they profess to profess? Each day, how many of these happen, a solidly as any material fact ever can be said to exist?

US bombers take off in the Middle East and drop some exploding gizmotrons on some .

US military contractors cash another paycheck of epic, pharaoh-level zeroes and numbers.

Trans-national extraction companies bribe, extort, intimidate to get another piece of Third-World land to deliver it rare earth mineral bounty.

Hedge fun criminals cash another million dollar number into their Caymans Islands bank account.

Religions and other institutional frauds gather the day’s daily haul of cash from the gullible poor and conscience-salved rich to make even greater propaganda sideshows for tomorrow.

Oh, but we’ve got fiction! There’s Jonathan Franzen, there was the church-going David Foster Wallace, there’s some other garret-bound MacArthur doofus ensconced in his or her treehouse, ready to put mania to paper to keep the fiction of fiction burning. More stories of family strife and individual discontent to keep the masses entranced with the bardic and monastic traditions of pretension and bafflegab.

Do the due diligence of accounting: your (my) expressions of humane resistance and heroic rational cooperation vs. the combined financial robbery of the above six food groups.

You (Me): a shiny nickel, a .05 cents of organic tasty gruel, per day of blogging and talking.

Them. the capitalizers in the supersystem: a neat daily haul of 1.4 trillion dollars, in US constant dollars.

That’s the sense of scale we need to incorporate into our writing. Weave that just and proper rational understanding of mass-produced futility into each and every blast of wind through the larynx or electrical wave coursing through your neo-frontal cortex, and you’ll be ready for social nihilism.